1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a method, system, and program for performing an input/output operation with respect to a logical device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In certain network computing environments, such as in a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN), peer-to-peer arrangement, Ethernet, etc., numerous of the systems connected to the network may have access to the file systems of other hosts connected to the network. In such environments, certain operating systems, such as the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and XP operating systems that include the NTFS file system, are designed to assume that any visible storage, whether in a network or locally connected, is owned by the local host. In such environments, if the local hosts access the file system, created on a storage device on the network, then data corruption may occur if the different hosts, acting independently, perform conflicting operations with respect to a volume.
Certain restore operations, such as a server-free full volume restore, allow one host to perform the restore using an extended copy command. A server-free backup/restore environment typically involves a server controlling a SAN router or other data movement device to backup or restore data between a backup storage device and a logical volume created on a storage device coupled to the network. In such server-free environment, multiple hosts on the network may perform a restore operation to cause the copying of the data to restore from the backup device to the target volume being restored. In such a server-free restore operation, a server does not have to copy the restore data into the server memory to build an image of the restore data, and then transfer that image to the backup device to restore. Instead, in the server-free environment, only the source and destination devices are involved, and the backup or restore copy operation is performed by a third-party copy function, typically initiated from a storage manager server
During such server free restore operations by one host, another host may access and write to the volume being restored. Such intervening writes during the restore may result in file system corruption and data loss. Further, the host writing to the volume being restored by another host may claim ownership of the file system occupying the volume, and then prevent the host that initiated the server-free restore from accessing the volume. When such a conflict occurs, the file system repair utility, such as the CHKDSK utility in the Microsoft Windows** operating system, needs to be called to attempt to repair the problem and recover data.
**Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. 
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for improved techniques to improve coordination of volume access operations to avoid conflicts and corruption problems when multiple devices have access to the volume over a network.